In competitive gaming, it’s crucial to have every edge you can get, so it’s important to make sure your game is tweaked to an optimal level.

To set your launch options perform the following:
While in steam, select Counter-Strike Source, then right click “Properties” as shown in the picture below.

Now click on “Set Launch Options“…

From here you can enter in a variety of launch options for Counter-Strike.. I personally like to use the following settings..

• “-w 800 -dxlevel 95 -console -refresh 120 -heapsize 1048576 -high -noforcemaccel -noforcemparms -noipx -nojoy”

The explanation for these settings can be found below..

-w800 Sets screen resolution to 800×600. I use low resolution setting to get optimal refresh rates. Disregard this setting if you’re on a LCD.

-dxlevel 95 Sets rendering level to maximum. (If you have a newer video card, lower dxlevels, will actually slow down your video rendering resulting in lower frames per second.)

-console Enables the console

-refresh 120 Sets monitor refresh rate to locked rate of 120hz. You need to be on a CRT to be able to make use of this command. If you’re on an LCD, you unfortunately cannot go above 60 or 75 due to limitations with the technology. Contrary to popular belief, refresh rates do effect LCD’s, even though they do not refresh like standard CRT’s. That’s an entire another article though.

-Heapsize 1048576 Allocates the optimal amount of memory depending on your computer. Take your amount of ram in kB and divide by 2. Since i have 2 gigs of ram, or 2097152 KB, i divided by 2 to get 1048576.

You can reference below to find yours..

• If you have….
  512MB System Memory:
  Your -heapsize should be: “262144″
  1GB System Memory:
  Your -heapsize should be: “524288″
  2GB System Memory:
  Your -heapsize should be: “1048576″

-high This command is probably the most important. It will force your computer to put Counter-Strike in high cpu priority, giving less resources to background processes, and more for CS.

-noforcemaccel This command disables mouse acceleration in CS. Very important if you’d like to build consistent aim.

-noforcemparms This command prevents windows from interfering with Counter-Strike and using desktop mouse acceleration settings.

-noipx Disables local network settings.

-nojoy Disables joystick detection

That’s all i got for now, make sure to check out my other article, “Running steam in low CPU priority” here.